The first stage of treatment in ESFT is Creating the Therapeutic System. It is all about establishing working relationships with family members and, as needed, extended family members and other professionals in the community. This course describes in detail the four clinical tasks comprising this treatment stage. These tasks include: 1) orienting families to ESFT and explaining how it works, 2) using the ecomap to identify important people to include in treatment, 3) cultivating the therapeutic alliance, and 4) gaining buy-in and engaging family members in treatment. Successful completion of these four treatment tasks requires therapists to adopt a relational, collaborative approach to working with families. This course demonstrates how to employ “partnership talk” with families to create a collaborative treatment context and to solidify working relationships within the therapeutic system.
This is a Beginning Level course. The target audience is all behavioral health professionals working with children and adolescents.
Learning Objectives
- Use ecomaps and an ESFT orienting script to begin the process of building a therapeutic system
- Describe the relationship between a therapeutic alliance and treatment engagement
- Identify the characteristics of a collaborative, relational interviewing approach with families
This course uses an online distance-learning self-paced format. It includes recorded audio, recorded video-based webinars, and selected readings. There are post-tests to ensure comprehension of the material. Participants can communicate with the instructors via the online moodle interface. Real-time communication with the instructor in our online, self-paced distance learning courses is not possible. However, participants can send an email to the instructor via the online moodle interface within the course and expect to receive a response within 48 hours. All course content, including post-tests, should take approximately 2 hours to complete.
Frequently Asked Questions
Visit our Self-Paced, Online Continuing Education Policies & FAQs for additional information regarding the CFBT online learning center, accommodations for disabilities, reporting problems with the course, instructions for viewing webinars, etc.